


The Long Way Around

by wynnebat



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Fluff, Hale Family Feels, Light Angst, Long-Distance Friendship, M/M, POV Peter Hale, POV Stiles Stilinski, Pack, Peter Hale Leaves Beacon Hills
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-18
Updated: 2019-01-18
Packaged: 2019-10-12 07:26:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17463185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnebat/pseuds/wynnebat
Summary: When Peter leaves Beacon Hills for good, he expects that to be it for the broken bonds of the last remaining members of the Hale pack. Fate and Stiles Stilinski aren’t of the same opinion.





	The Long Way Around

**Author's Note:**

> Canon divergence AU: Peter comes back to life before the rest of the season 2 plot occurs. Also, this only loosely follows canon in general since I haven't watched Teen Wolf in ages.

Peter claws his way back to life from the mind of a teenage girl and the semblance of an afterlife he inhabited after his nephew tore out his throat. He opens his eyes and finds himself buried below the rotting floorboards of the Hale home. He tips his head back against the wet dirt and looks up through the hole in the floorboards and the ceiling. It is dark and quiet and he is alone, breaking his way through to the world of the living in the same place he’d been burned alive twice. He expects to be angry or prideful. His resurrection is a feat of power and intelligence that he would dare anyone else to achieve, and he has quite a bit to still be angry about. He isn’t.

Peter realizes, with stunning clarity, that he doesn’t want to be anywhere near here. He was born here and he died here, for however long it stuck, and he never wants to see this burned-out husk of a dream again. He wrests himself out of the floor. Dying did nothing for his muscle strength. His clothes are unsalvageable, but he only needs them until he can procure some proper clothing. He steps out of the structure that can generously be called a house. Derek’s scent no longer lingers. Good—Peter doesn’t approve of drowning in guilt in a place like this. If one’s going to indulge in self-pity, one should do so fashionably.

The air is crisp despite the unyielding linger of fire. Small animals rustle through the preserve. In the distance, a car can be heard. The distance grows closer while Peter’s ears are attuned to the sound. He might have assumed it was Lydia putting the clues together, but despite everything that happened the night he died, he remembers that car. He sees the headlights first, then his eyes grow used to the sudden light and he sees that blasted Jeep. Peter isn’t a mechanic, but he can tell just from the sound that there’s something mechanically wrong with it. Still, it isn’t his problem.

The distance between himself and the Jeep shrinks.

It grows large and ugly as it nears. He wonders, nearly absently, if Stiles is going to run him over.

Finding his way back to life another time would be difficult. Not to mention poor Lydia might eventually stop being traumatized and start being angry, which will not serve him well in leeching off her banshee powers.

The Jeep stops barely two feet away from him.

Stiles steps out, his eyes wide as he takes in Peter’s renewed existence. Peter feels conflicting urges to smirk and to run to the nearest clothing store. He’d rather not be seen like this, but it’s too late for that now.

“Hello, Stiles,” Peter says, voice light, as though they’re talking about the weather. He can’t help adding, “Lovely night, isn’t it? Perfect for a resurrection.”

“Why—” Stiles splutters. “No, I know why, it’s because you live to torture everyone around you, but _how_? How the fuck are you alive? I watched you die. It was very traumatic so my memories are _very_ clear.”

“You’ve accepted the existence of werewolves but you can’t accept the fact that death is malleable?” Peter shakes his head and walks around to the passenger side of the Jeep. He doesn’t trust himself to drive at the moment. Also, Stiles seems like the type to hold a grudge if Peter steals his car and leaves him alone in the preserve. “Thanks for the ride, by the way.”

The door is unlocked. Stiles should know better.

Peter slips right in.

From the outside, Stiles stares at him for one long moment before letting out a deep, irritated breath. “I haven’t accepted the existence of werewolves. You’re all insane, every single one of you, and out of all of them, you’re the worst.” Still, he walks back to the Jeep and slams the door after himself. He doesn’t switch gears immediately, turning instead to Peter and asking, “Are you going to threaten to kill me if I tell you to get out of my Jeep?”

“If I have to.” Peter doesn’t particularly want to. Out of everyone in Beacon Hills, Stiles is his favorite. A clever, fascinating young man, and if Peter were any less aware of the grave dirt stuck to his skin, he might have flirted with him for the entertainment value alone. Just to rile him up, just to get a glimpse of something beyond anger and pain and a deep, troubling apathy. He cares about himself—if there is one thing he has always cared about, it has been himself—but it feels as though the rest of the world burned too, and unlike him, it did not come out of the flames.

“Great,” Stiles says, tense but more willing now that Peter’s claws haven’t approached his head. “Where are we going?”

“I need a shower,” Peter says. Where, he doesn’t care. There is dirt under his nails. Absently, he picks a splinter out of his thumb and watches the skin knit together.

He tries to recall a list of old acquaintances who may not be too shocked if he arrives on their doorstep, but he’s all too aware of how much can change in six years. Doorsteps change. Packs put down roots, but the others who Peter’s felt kinship with, those on the outskirts of the nonhuman community, aren’t the type to stick around.

“And then what?” Finally, Stiles begins to drive them out of the preserve, his attention on his surroundings as though he expects a deer to run out of the woods at any moment. Or perhaps another undead werewolf to walk into his path. “More mayhem and murder?”

“Why, have you been bored without me?” Peter ignores Stiles’ instant, loud denial, and lets the truth fill the space between them. He knows better than anyone that there are so many versions of truth, so many facets and foundations, but there is only one that matters now. There is nowhere for him to go. “Take me to my nephew. I trust he has a shower.”

Stiles takes his eyes off the road for a moment to look at him. His face is all shadow and doubt. “The same guy who killed you? That guy?”

“Are you worried about me?”

“I’m worried about _him_ ,” Stiles says in reply. There’s no lie in the beat of his heart. Young love, maybe.

Even the reminder of his death doesn’t inspire the anger it should. It’s a blow to his pride, but Peter’s gaze is set on the horizon. He has a future, or he will as soon as he makes his way out of this town. He wants to see the way the moon shines light on some place a thousand miles away. He wants a place where fire can’t touch him.

He never wants anyone to touch his throat again.

He wants, more than anything, to catch his breath and regroup. Regroup, he thinks again, and huffs wryly. He has less than he did before. At least when he was motionless in a coma, he could pretend to himself that perhaps he still had some pack members out there. Now one is dead by his own hand, another will have nothing to do with him, and the remains of the rest lie buried in a graveyard in the middle of Beacon Hills because no one cared enough to remember the Hales would have wanted to be buried out in the preserve. Derek gave him that much, at least. Peter can’t imagine having been buried next to Talia’s burned skeleton. Or god forbid, running into any other bones as he gets out of the ground. He already feels like a zombie and the rest of the Hales around him would not have been a comforting addition in the slightest.

“I’ve completed my revenge. Derek will get himself killed one day, by one girlfriend or another, but I’ll be far away when it happens. I’ve had it with this town. I never want to step foot in it again.” Peter breathes in, reminds himself that he has all the time in the world now. He is alive. “Besides, he’ll be happy to hear I’m leaving for good.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Stiles says. He taps his fingers against the wheel. “You’re really leaving?”

“If you’d said yes, you would’ve been able to hear the truth by my heartbeat.”

“No thanks. I’m good.” It’s not a lie, but Stiles’ heartbeat is suddenly jumpy, uncertain. Peter realizes why when Stiles takes a turn into the quiet, human suburban part of town, houses all in neat rows, nearly all of them dark except for the glow of streetlights. “I haven’t seen Derek in two weeks,” Stiles says as he parks the Jeep in a driveway of an otherwise unremarkable house. “I don’t know where he lives and I don’t have his number. Scott and I are just used to him appearing out of nowhere and being all growly.”

“I taught him that,” Peter says with the smallest flicker of fondness that hasn’t been snuffed out. Give it time. “The breaking and entering, not the bad manners.”

“Breaking and entering is bad manners.”

“Is it?” Peter steps out of the car. His vanity prickles at him, and he steps onto the doorstep, away from the shining streetlight. “You, on the other hand, have great ones.”

“I’ve gone insane,” Stiles corrects, but he leans into that insanity, pulling the front door open for Peter. “My dad is at work. Go upstairs, first door to the left. There’s towels in the closet across from the sink. I’ll find some clothes for you.”

It stings, but less so than going to Derek’s. “Thank you, Stiles.”

“Don’t mention it. Really, don’t.” Stiles doesn’t turn the lights on until Peter’s most of the way upstairs, turning a corner and reaching heaven in the form of a bathroom.

Peter grimaces deeply before even looking at himself in the mirror, then deeper once he sees his reflection. He’s surprised Stiles didn’t run him over with his Jeep at first sight. Hell, he’s surprised Stiles even recognized him. He’s covered in dirt from head to toe. There is mold on the outer layer of his skin. Had he not healed fully on his return from death, it would also be inside of him. Peter represses a shudder. He is alive.

The shower is glorious despite the terrible water pressure and only one handle and showerhead. It’s a thousand times better than what the hospital had subjected him to. He stands of his own strength, washes the dirt from his body, and shampoos his hair twice. By the time he steps out, the water has run cold. Outside the bathroom door, Peter finds a pile of clothes that smell more like dust than laundry detergent.

He is clean, and he is warm, and he is alive. Everything else is irrelevant.

*

Downstairs, Stiles sits down at the kitchen table and wonders what in all fuck he’s doing. Peter Hale is in his house. That Peter Hale. The murderous alpha werewolf, now less murderous, still a werewolf. Still perfectly capable of tearing Stiles’ throat out, no matter if his claws are covered in dirt. There’s a part of him that’s still terrified of Peter Hale. It might always be there; Stiles has been scared before, but that horrible, heart-stopping terror when he’d thought Peter would kill him? Yeah, that was a first. Before Peter, violence was video games and bloody noses in lacrosse, and that time his father was wounded on the job.

He should have dumped Peter at the nearest motel or tried harder to find a way to contact Derek. Instead, Stiles stands, paces the kitchen, and finds some spare clothes that won’t be missed. He grabs his dad’s old things, stuffed in the back of a closet and forgotten about, and dumps them in front of the bathroom door. Peter’s been in there a while now. Stiles considers warning him about the water, but it’s on Peter if he wants to wait it out until the water abruptly goes cold.

Back downstairs again, Stiles reheats some leftovers because it’s late and he’s hungry, dammit.

He sits there eating until he hears the water turn off.

Reluctantly, he heats a plate for Peter, glaring at it all the while.

If he were spontaneously resurrected, he’d like a nice meal, too. It doesn’t change the fact that Peter nearly killed Lydia and threatened to kill everyone else. It also doesn’t change the fact that down to his very marrow, Stiles knows that the world is better off without people like Kate Argent and the people who helped her burn down a house of innocent people. Scott’s the one with divided sympathies. Stiles has a hard time remembering why he should care about a family that’s still a possible danger to his best friend. And to Peter, although Stiles can’t help but think the world would be better off without Peter, too.

But does he want to make sure it happens?

He can call Scott, who’s probably lurking around Allison’s house again tonight and can quickly get the news to Chris.

Peter’s footsteps are soft, but the stairs creak at anything heavier than twenty pounds. A few more footsteps and he’s stepping into the kitchen, and it’s normal that Stiles notices he looks better without all the dirt and grime. Less like an extra on The Walking Dead, more like a home magazine model in a soft knitted sweater and his hair still a little wet. Stiles’ dad has hated that sweater ever since he got it as a gift six years ago, so it’s no loss if Peter leaves Beacon Hills with it. If he’s leaving at all.

There’s something in the line of Peter’s shoulders, something in his stance, and even when he smirks and says, “Why, _Stiles_ ,” at the second plate of food, he doesn’t sound like the terrifying alpha who slammed Stiles against a car.

“Insanity,” Stiles says again, taking Peter’s words as an actual question. Peter could be faking the softness, but what’s the point? Why would Peter sit down into the chair across from him with a flicker of tired relief, why would he dig into the food without continuing his pointed comment?

“This is delicious,” Peter says a moment later.

“Yeah, thanks.” Stiles digs the salad out of the fridge. A man who just dug himself out of his grave own probably needs some more greens. “So, resurrection did a number on you.”

“You don’t sound like you’re impressed by the fact that I brought myself back to life.”

Stiles rolls his eyes, bats his eyelashes. “Tell me how you did it and maybe I’ll be impressed.”

To Stiles’ surprise, Peter does.

Stiles hangs onto every word despite telling himself firmly that it isn’t that cool. There’s thousands of myths and religious stories where people come back to life. Peter isn’t all that special. What he is, though, is tenacious and lucky, and Stiles can’t help but be impressed. And worried—if Lydia is also some kind of supernatural being, who else is one? Is the whole town of Beacon Hills full of unknowing fur and claws? It’s confusing and worrying, but Stiles will never regret opening his eyes to the world past regular human society. He hates the very idea of the fact that he could’ve lived his whole life without knowing (without fearing). It’s not worth Scott nearly getting killed, but it’s worth a lot. Maybe, it’s worth a hot meal and a ride.

Peter is different now. He’s not an alpha anymore, or so he claims, and he hasn’t menaced Stiles at all, not really. While a part of Stiles is relieved, mostly he’s just waiting for the other shoe to drop. For someone to yell gotcha, for those claws to come out again. How long before Peter’s personality revives itself? And is it any better for him to be far away when it happens, around some unsuspecting alpha?

It’s not too late to call Scott.

“Why were you in the preserve tonight?” Peter asks, placing his fork down and aiming a searching look at Stiles. “There was no reason for you to be there. Or do you often take long drives in the woods?”

“You never know what’s going to pop out of the ground,” Stiles replies, uncomfortable with the question. He never used to drive into the preserve. The only times he’d gone were unwilling school trips. Hiking in general with his level of clumsiness is a threat to himself and others. “I’ve been doing it a lot, lately.”

There’s been some kind of pull, some strange need. Or maybe it’s the insomnia and an overactive imagination. Even after Peter died and Derek stopped living at the old Hale house, it never felt like Stiles was done with the Hales. They’d been a momentary presence in his life, all in all, but they cast such large shadows. None of it felt settled, and so Stiles kept finding himself in the preserve with reasons that didn’t make sense even in the back of his mind.

Seeing Peter now, Stiles wonders if somehow, he was just waiting for Peter to return.

If some sixth sense knew that Peter couldn’t just stay dead.

Stiles has always had a finely-tuned danger signal. He’s just never properly heeded it a day in his life.

“Where to now?” Stiles asks once Peter has finished eating. He doesn’t offer for him to stay the night. That would definitely be going too far and he’s not explaining to his dad in the morning why there’s a man in the guest bedroom.

Peter doesn’t try to angle for it. “If you’re still willing to be my cab driver—”

“Willing is a bit much.”

“—then I have a few things to pick up, first.” Peter’s mouth twitches with amusement, and Stiles can tell he’s going to be baited before Peter even says, “Take me to Beacon Hills High.”

Throughout the entire ride, Peter won’t say a word about why he chose the high school as his destination. Stiles runs through all the options he can think of—not that there’s much, there’s no good reason for someone to willingly choose a high school over literally any other building in town—but Peter stays inscrutable.

Upon arrival, Stiles is exasperated enough to ask, “Are you looking for more high schoolers to gobble up? Am I going to be an accomplice to murder?” Despite his suspicions, he follows Peter out of the Jeep and across the parking lot.

“You were already an accomplice to my murder. I’d think you would be a pro at it by now.” Peter stops at the school’s sign and pops out his claws.

Stiles doesn’t get it, but he can’t say he hasn’t had similar thoughts in the past. Involving eggs and Harris’s office. “Are we really defacing the school sign? That’s the first thing you want to do now that you’re a member of the undead?”

“I’m not a zombie, Stiles.”

“Yeah, I believe you.”

Stiles watches intently as Peter reaches not for the front of the sign, but for the right side, where he inserts his claws into a subtle groove in the stone. The stone sign gives an ear-splitting creak as it begins to move, slowly revealing a dark passageway underneath it. Stiles glances behind himself—no one. The high school is dark and empty at this time of night. He won’t say it aloud since his dad’s the sheriff, but Beacon Hills’ security is... kind of shit.

Peter takes the first step down the passageway and looks back at Stiles with more amusement than he’s expressed all night. “I’m not leading you down to be murdered. I promise.”

“I swear I had better instincts about shit like this at some point,” Stiles replies, and follows him down. The stone sign grinds shut behind him, the sound too similar to nails on a chalkboard.

The worst thing is: Stiles doesn’t think he’s going to be murdered. There wasn’t anything dark to Peter’s amusement, and Stiles remembers him at his darkest. Peter’s claws against his skin still haunt his nightmares sometimes. His other dreams, too, but the human psyche is bullshit like that. The tunnel brings them to a large room beneath the high school, like something out of a children’s adventure novel, where every house had a secret room. Stiles is beginning to think he needs to make sure his own house doesn’t have any extras if this is what is under his perfectly ordinary high school. Stiles flicks the flashlight setting on his phone on and illuminates the space directly in front of them. Shelves of books and items line the walls of the room. His gaze flickers between stoppered vials of god knows what and an old, faded map half rolled out on one of the shelves and a giant old-fashioned safe on the far end. It’s a musty, dusty treasure trove. Stiles never wants to leave.

“The Hale family vault,” Peter says, gesturing at the room. “Congratulations. You’re the first non-Hale to step foot in here.”

“In years?”

Peter raises an eyebrow and ignores the apparently unnecessary qualifier.

“Wow,” Stiles says, shaking his head. “You guys were private.”

“Cautious,” Peter corrects, but he betrays his words by voicing no complaints when Stiles picks up anything he can get his hands on, reading the labels of obscure herbal ingredients—and some not-herbal, ew—and flipping through various books.

Beyond the bounds of Stiles’ attention, Peter is working on the safe’s lock, pressing his ear against safe as he tries out different combinations. After a while, Stiles sits down next to him, a hundred year old journal in his hand whose pages Stiles flips with the same steadiness in his hands that he’d created a molotov cocktail with. Maybe the same steadiness that he now regards Peter with, because Peter isn’t delicate, he’s not fragile, but he’s something.

“More breaking and entering?”

“It’s hardly illegal to break into my own safe,” Peter replies, his ear still resting against the safe, although Stiles must have disrupted his concentration. Peter closes his eyes, opens them with a shining electric blue tint, and begins to turn the knob again, tick by tick. When he speaks, Stiles doesn’t expect it, startling from his book. “I don’t remember everything from before the fire.” His words have an underlying hardness to them, almost a dare for Stiles to pity him, which would only get Stiles clawed. “Most of it came back to me when I regained by strength, but some... my phone number, which I hadn’t changed in eight years, the names of my college professors, the code to this safe that I remember buying myself.”

“I’m sorry,” Stiles says, even if it’s not enough.

It should be enough. More than enough, because Stiles should blame him for the madness and chaos that Peter brought into Beacon Hills, but he can’t erase the part of himself that understands. It’s insanity, all of this, and Stiles doubts that it’ll change even after Peter is gone from this town.

Another ten minutes, the safe is open. Stiles leans in around Peter to get a look inside. The safe is filled from top to bottom with stacks of bills, books, and bottles like the old, dusty ones on the shelves, the kind filled with ingredients Stiles can’t identify or understand the significance of. The bills are not cash, that much he can tell at a glance. Stiles picks one bundle up. It’s old, with old-timey print and writing, but there’s enough light to identify it.

“These are cool as hell,” Stiles says, flipping the paper over to read the back. “They’re bearer bonds, aren’t they? Owned by whoever physically holds them with no way to prove transaction history or the true owner. They’re not even issued any longer since the tax code change in the eighties.” That economics essay, Stiles had actually been able to stay on topic. For too long—Finstock asked for four pages, Stiles gave him ten. “Are they worth anything?”

“Something, yes,” Peter replies. While Stiles had been studying the bonds, he’d pulled out a duffel bag from somewhere and begun piling the stacks of bonds inside. “It’s my share of the family’s inheritance and I don’t intend to leave it here.”

“You really don’t plan to come back.” It’s not that he hadn’t believed Peter—the sudden personality change and insistence on getting out had been enough—but this brings it home for him. Peter is taking his shit and getting out of here. The fact that a former alpha, one who used to be so powerful, is fleeing from Beacon Hills sends a shiver sown Stiles’ spine. Beacon Hills used to be a safe, boring town, one where Stiles never worried about walking around in the dark. It hasn’t been the same ever since the body in the woods—or rather, not that Stiles knew it at the time, the fire.

“I’m done with it. I gave my all to my pack—my family—and I took my revenge for them.” Peter’s hand tightens around the bills in his grip, but not enough to tear them. “And for myself.”

“And Derek?” Even as he says it, Stiles doesn’t know which way he means it—if he’s asking if Peter took his revenge for Derek, or if there’s still one person left for Peter to take revenge on. Temporary camaraderie or not, he’d find a way to warn Derek that Peter’s back and wants to hurt him.

“He had six years to kill her,” Peter replies, packing the last of the bills into the bag. He throws the rest of the contents of the vault inside, too, carefully placing the glass containers into the bag’s inside pockets. “And I had weeks to kill him. I didn’t—don’t—want him dead.”

Stiles wonders what it says about Peter, that he’d kill his niece but not his nephew. He stands when Peter stands, meets his gaze, doesn’t regret being here. Morals, he used to have some. He’ll have to check under the bed for them when he gets home. Casually, Stiles says, “You know, I wouldn’t mind a way to get into this place in case things go to hell again later.”

“Cozy up to my nephew,” Peter simply says. He’s a jerk. “It’s all his, now. The last Hale in Beacon Hills.”

A jerk with a reason, but still a jerk. Stiles sighs. “Fine. If you must.”

“I must. Generations of Hales might haunt me if I left a box of Hale claws somewhere within your reach.” Peter’s tone isn’t leading, and there’s no smirk on his lips, but there’s something in his eyes that makes Stiles’ heart thump hard against his chest.

“Yeah, that would be horrible.” He hides his grin as Peter straps the duffel bag across his shoulder and begins to walk toward the secret tunnel. The safe is open a fraction of an inch and slides open soundlessly when Stiles tugs at the handle. Inside, there’s one small, lonely wooden box that Stiles slips into his sweatshirt pocket before following Peter. Fuck, it’s hard to hate _this_ Peter. Stiles makes a valiant effort at it, but he’s been expertly bribed.

Scott doesn’t have to know, really. It’ll be Stiles’ secret. One tiny, innocent secret. Peter will be gone soon, anyway.

Their next and final stop is a car rental place because even in his hurry to leave town, Peter is too good for the bus system. Stiles parks his Jeep and reaches into his glove compartment. Buried beneath a pile of unhelpful junk there is a crumbled old homework assignment (B minus, fuck you, Harris) and a pen with a bank logo. Stiles writes down his cell phone number, hoping he’s not making a huge mistake.

“Here,” he says, handing it to Peter. “I might need your help someday.” Someday is the closest to hopeful that he’ll get. Beacon Hills is full of hunters and werewolves, and humans caught up in the middle. “And who knows, maybe you’ll need mine.” He says it like a joke, because what the hell is a human going to be able to do when Peter has fangs and claws, but there’s no scorn in Peter’s eyes.

“Racking up favors, Stiles? You shouldn’t worry. You already have mine.” He says it easily, like it’s an established fact. Like Stiles isn’t four rungs from the most unpopular guy at the high school they just broke into. And Stiles shouldn’t be charmed because it doesn’t even seem like Peter is trying to be charming. He’s already opening the door of Stiles’ Jeep, a few steps away from being out of Stiles’ life completely. “Goodbye, Stiles.”

“Have a good life, Peter,” Stiles relies. No more murdering, he could say, or try not to get set on fire again.

Instead, he just watches Peter walk away, the small box of claws strangely heavy in the pocket of his sweatshirt. Beacon Hills is quiet the entire time Stiles drives back home, but Stiles knows better now than to mistake silence for calm.

*

Peter drives, not stopping until he hits the _Goodbye Beacon Hills_ billboard, barely visible in the dark of night. He feels lighter as he leaves town lines, then the county, then the state. He’d been driving simply to drive at first, not caring which direction the car took him as long as it was out of Beacon Hills, but the lightness brings clarity of thought, and Peter knows where he’ll go to recuperate. He still feels weak, even for a beta. It’s hard to remember past the alpha rush of power and the six years of pain. For all he knows, this is how a beta should feel. An omega, now, and he smiles grimly into the night. The same way he’s done with Beacon Hills, he’s done with the concept of pack. He’d tried. God knows he’d tried. But maybe men like him aren’t cut out for pack.

The car is a piece of crap, but it’s good enough for the trip. It’s the best he could get without any identification or a credit card to leave on file. The attendant had been convinced by one of the bundles of cash he’d hidden between all the bearer bonds. Back then he’d thought himself to be overly cautions. Now, Peter is thankful for his forethought, though next time around, he’s hiding copies of his identification papers along with the stash of money. It’s going to a bureaucratic nightmare trying to rebuild his identity. And yet, he is alive, and Peter hasn’t worked though the entirety of his elation regarding that fact.

In Washington, he stops by a round the clock diner and orders nearly half their menu. On a whim, he adds curly fries to his order. Stiles would like the place, Peter thinks, huffing at himself for even remembering Stiles’ curly fry addiction. He’d cared about turning Scott to his side, but Scott’s best friend had turned out to be far more interesting. And the conversations he’d overheard from Stiles at least hadn’t been centered around an Argent, though Stiles’ feelings for the banshee girl had been almost as annoying.

Once sated, he gets in the car again. It’s too dark to appreciate the nature, or the long driveway to the Hales’ summer cabin, with no neighbors for as far as the wolf can howl. It’s the kind of cabin that can fit a family of twelve with room to spare for in-laws and guests, so more of a house with some of the rustic aesthetic of a cabin. The Hales have always been a large, sprawling pack, with more members than they knew what to do with. They’d preferred a pack of family than turned humans, but with most of the adults having several kids each, they hadn’t been lacking in pack. Peter had been the odd one out. Even at twenty-six, he’d had little interest in settling down and raising the newest generation of Hales. Now, he can only be relieved that he hadn’t been forced to lose a spouse or a child in the fire. Losing his entire pack had been bad enough.

There’s a spare key under the empty birdhouse hanging from one of the trees in front of the cabin. It slips into the lock despite the rust. With an application of his shifted strength, the door opens. To his relief, the cabin is largely free of scents other than dust. There are still reminders of his family everywhere—from Talia’s taste in furniture to Laura’s painting in the living room to Cora’s collection of RL Stine novels stacked on top of the television—but their smells are gone, faded away during the six years.

Peter could take the master bedroom, if he wanted. And he will, tomorrow.

Tonight, he unrolls the covers of the room that hardly anyone but him had ever used, resting his head on the pillow and breathing cold fresh air from the temporarily open window. Beacon Hills is far behind him. The cabin is still a mountain of painful memories, but there is no ash here, no smell of fire. He won’t be here for long. Just enough to rest, maybe to walk one of the hiking trails for old time’s sake. Or to run this forest again as a wolf, like he used to when the Beacon Hills preserve would start to feel too small and familiar, or when Talia’s presence would become overbearing. He’d escape to this cabin for a while to regroup, to tell himself that he could always leave if he wanted, and to eventually return. Now, there is nowhere to return, but that’s alright. He’ll make do.

Peter drives the half hour to the nearest town the next day and returns with a trunk full of groceries, temporary clothes (the town is tiny and wouldn’t recognize a proper clothing store if it dropped in out of nowhere), and a car. Also temporary, but better than the rental, which he arranges to be dropped off. He makes arrangements for the cabin’s heating and power to be turned back on. Once he’s back at the cabin, Peter cooks his first proper meal in six years and uses his claws to slice open the packaging on his new cell phone.

For a moment, Peter considers throwing the slip of paper away and severing his ties to Beacon Hills. He doesn’t owe the town anything. Peter can do whatever he wants to do.

And what he wants is this:

To turn the phone on, enter a number in the list of contacts, and to say _Hello, Stiles_.

In reply, Stiles asks if Peter opted for a spot of murder on his way out of town, though it’s not a serious accusation. Does Mr. Lahey have anything to do with the supernatural? Because he was ripped apart the night before. Helpfully, Stiles even includes police photographs, and Peter stirs his pasta as he huffs a laugh, appalled and intrigued by the news. He’d said goodbye to Beacon Hills, but perhaps he shouldn’t have tried to say goodbye to Stiles. He’s better with hellos.

And without another thought, Peter presses the call button.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'm also on [tumblr](https://crownwithoutstones.tumblr.com/).


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